'Grey' matters

Meredith's dead!? Seriously!?

I had my reservations going into tonight's show. For days the radio stations and ABC ran their promos proclaiming that the Seattle Grace interns are faced with their hardest task yet and blah, blah, blah, and all of them ended with Mr. Dramatic Announcer Man adding and everybody is wondering where's Meredith ...

ugh.

There are good episodes of Grey's where the storylines are full of humanity and real drama and the wit flies all over the hospital. Then there are shows that are so absurd it's hard to keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets ... See: last year's two-part Super Bowl episode bomb scare, any of the season-ending episodes last year during which Izzie fell madly for Denny -- a patient she'd known only a couple weeks and never knew outside the hospital.

Moral of the story: Grey's needs to stay away from trying to do these lavish multi-part episodes where they try to amp up the drama. They never work. They're cheesy.

... So tonight's episode -- part two of three -- opens with a recap of last week's episode which had the interns being summoned to a mass casualty situation, which turns out to be some kind of ferry boat fire and accident. Karev saves a pregnant woman, George saves a mother whose worried about her son, Izzie gets pulled on board the ferry to save a man whose pinned under a car, and a lost little girl latches on to Meredith, who also works on a man injured at the end of the pier ...

The drama (or so the show's writers want us to believe) really begins when the man flails his arms and knocks Meredith into the water ...

So begins Part II tonight. Meredith is in the water ... But get this!? She's not yelling for help. She's not flailing her arms trying to save herself or get back to the pier, which you would think should be just a couple feet from her -- or even a ferry boat which can't be too far away either.

Nope. All the camera shots make it appear as though she's just been dropped in the middle of the ocean. And then Meredith just slips under the water and disappears ...

Gimme a break.

The next 45 minutes of the show (Remember this is an hour-long show ...) include scenes with Shepherd looking for Meredith. And back at the hospital scene, Christina -- who normally would be focused on nothing but dealing with the emergency crisis -- is asking everybody if they've seen Meredith and whining because she needs to tell Meredith about her engagement to Burke, which the stubborn little Christina had plenty of chances to do earlier ...

Finally, we see Shepherd pull Meredith out of the water with such ease it begs the question again -- Why couldn't Meredith just save herself?!

... But oh no, only in TV land right? Whatever.

... Meredith is blue in the face and the doctors rush her to the hospital, where we're ultimately made to think she's dead.

And here I thought Grey's Anatomy had finally got its mojo back this season ...

Ironically, one of the highlights of the show was the end, during which we see a healthy Meredith sit up on the operating table. She looks to her left and sees Dylan the bomb technician (Kyle Chandler) killed in the infamous bomb episode last year and to her right is none other than Denny ...

I can't see how the Grey's writers could possibly kill off their title character in just the third season of one of the most popular shows on television. But then again they've written stranger things into this show and inconsistency seems to rule. Just when you think you know and understand a character, they make him or her go completely wacko in the next week's episode ...

The way things are going, I'm betting they kill off Meredith. And then they'll bring her back midway through next season when her mother miraculously becomes lucid again and comes back to perform one last life-saving surgery on her daughter. Then the chief will retire after all, run off with Meredith's mother, they'll live happily every after and Izzie will be named chief because she's shown such smarts and courage as an intern -- and she's a millionaire ...

More Grey's reads ...
a Who's leaving "Grey's Anatomy"?
a 'Grey's Anatomy' crossing into 'ER' territory? ... some of the comments on this message board are great!
a TV Blend recap
a 'Grey's Anatomy' shocker: Not reality but ...
a 'Grey's Anatomy'! Meredith is dead! Or not! Discuss!